New York Times, Friday, April 7, 2017

There are few constructors who can put together a 66- or even 68-word themeless as smoothly as PB can. Today, he goes all the way down to a 62-worder, one of the toughest tasks in all of construction. A puzzle with so few words is bound to have big white spaces to fill, and today it's that giant swath in the middle. So many long entries intersecting each other!

A constructor's secret: those "stairstep" chunks of black squares in the north, west, east, and south can make filling a low-word-count grid like this almost an order of magnitude easier. Not only do those blocks chip away at the number of letters you need to put in, but they tend to stagger entries, making for more favorable vowel/consonant patterns.

It's a tricky balance, though — use too many of these stairstep chunks, and your grid looks visually unappealing. (Also, overanalytical/anal constructors notice your overusage and annoyingly point them out.) I like PB's result today, pairs of stairstep chunks forming two implied diagonal lines from lower left to upper right. Pretty.

The result is amazingly smooth, not a surprise given PB's emphasis on avoiding crossword glue. However, the usual trade-off between snazziness and smoothness comes into play even more than usual, with the former suffering. I only got excited about a few of the answers in that big middle: PENNY ARCADE, HERE WE GO, and SPEAKEASY.

No doubt, it's subjective. But HOUSE CLEANS doesn't do much for me, for example. (CLEANS HOUSE is much more evocative; a term for making huge changes in an organization.) And I more or less know what a FIRESCREEN, CRADLE SONG, and STONE CIRCLE are ... but I wouldn't go out of my way to incorporate them into a themeless. The last one was a real letdown — I so badly wanted the awesome STONEHENGE.

Along with the oddball LARRUP and arbitrary SIX-YEAR-OLDS, I felt the grid didn't have nearly as much pizzazz as I generally want.

But a 62-word grid is a feat in its own right, and they're usually full of crossword glue splattered liberally around. Impressive, to have executed so smoothly on such a hard task.